My friend has deployed Phorge for himself and appears to be happy with it.

With all the recent fixes and features, Photon is now my default lemmy client :]

Thanks to @Xylight for starting this project and being so responsive on GitHub (I’m @pbui).

It’s unfortunate, but the reality is that many of the proprietary services are… free, convenient, and where the people are.

Most projects do not have a lot of funding, so it makes sense to use low cost platforms with the least amount of friction. I think most developers are aware of the risks and trade-offs, but make a pragmatic decision to use these proprietary services b/c the benefits for them outweigh the costs.